Names, Races and the Color of Confusion

Surprisingly, I have taken little flak for my argument that Anglo is an inaccurate and offensive term for white.

I had agreed on that point with attorney Steven Gourley, who had written that “Anglo is and always has been a pejorative used by Spanish-speaking inhabitants to describe English-speaking Caucasians.”

I also noted that it is the style of The Times itself to use Anglo when comparing whites with Asians and Latinos, but white when comparing them with blacks.

It was on this point that the flak came.

Wrote Maril Delly: “You kept referring to Black people by spelling the word black , as if you were referring to a color instead of a group of people. Asians was capitalized, Whites was capitalized. I would like to know why Blacks was not.”

People read what they expect to read. Actually, I used the word white eight times, and in each case the w was not capitalized.

The same strange phenomenon also affected the vision of Prof. D.K. Wilgus of the Folklore and Mythology Program at UCLA, and Eleanor R. Long, research associate at the UCLA Folklore and Mythology Center.

“It was rather chilling,” they write, “to see a whole column written by our commentator on all things human and devoted to the subject of the names people choose for themselves as opposed to the names other people choose to call them by--a column in which one, and only one, of those names is not treated as proper names conventionally are treated, capitalizing the initial letter. . . .”

The “one, and only one” they refer to is black . Evidently Long and Wilgus did not notice that in eight uses of white I did not capitalize it once.

“Do you really suppose,” they continue, “that Blacks prefer it that way? Or is it a sign that we have not come as far as we like to think we have from the unspoken attitude that ‘blacks,’ unlike all other people on Earth, are in the United States not really people entitled to a proper name of their own at all, but somehow fall into the same category as dogs, cats, horses . . . ?”

And whites?

As a white, I have never felt insulted by the lower-case w , while Asian, Latino and Negro (before the term was discarded) were capitalized. If Blacks want to be capitalized, let’s do it. In that case, of course, Whites would have to be capitalized too, or the lower-case w might somehow be taken perversely as a mark of superiority.

Mike Abels notes that Jet and Ebony magazines capitalize Black, which I would take as a sign that their readers prefer it. We discarded Negro for black because the blacks wanted it; why not keep the capital and call them Black?

Like me and Gourley, Ian D. Campbell of Beverly Hills objects to Anglo as inaccurate and insulting to whites of various national origins other than English.

“Being of Scottish descent, I too resent it, although perhaps not quite so deeply as my Irish-American friends who will remind you that the Irish were a subject people of the English for hundreds of years.”

Rabbi Alfred Wolf writes that “it is futile to subdivide the human race in any objective fashion.” He points out that 2,000 years before the Declaration of Independence Jewish teachers concluded from Genesis that “God created the human species (Hebrew Adam ) in God’s image, in order to teach that men and women of all races and in all places are equal even though no two are alike. Once we absorb and accept this lesson of the individual’s uniqueness, classification by color or race, language or religion--though necessary--is of minor importance.”

In “Ever Since Darwin” the brilliant Harvard biologist Steven Jay Gould also questions the division of man into subspecies as races.

“Geographic variability, not race, is self-evident. No one can deny that Homo sapiens is a strongly differentiated species; few will quarrel with the observation that differences in skin color are the most striking outward signs of this variability. But the fact of variability does not require the designation of races. There are better ways to study human differences.”

Meanwhile, George M. Morrison of Monrovia questions my claim to Welsh ancestry. “Smith is a Welsh name?” he asks.

My mother was a Hughes.